SUNFEST 2010: Review

April 28th began in a bittersweet fashion. The excitement was palpable on the way to West Palm beach for two days full of music and good times. Just as reference let me say that Soyprensa’s headquarters in the U.S. are located in Miami which is proximately one hour and forty minutes away from West Palm Beach. It was just before half of the way when the news broke out, the Flaming Lips were canceling their performance on the Sunfest due to an emergency in which Steve Drozd had to be rushed to the hospital. TOTAL BUMMER. The flaming Lips were the main reason for many fans to buy tickets to this festival. Now, the anger that you are reading doesn’t have anything to do with the festival, or with the band, it just pain sucked and i had to put it in this article somewhere. So anyway, we scratched covering the second day when we heard the news (Sorry ZZ Top fans). After the initial shock, however, we ponied up and went for the opening day which actually had a pretty decent line up.
The first stop after getting to the festival was These United States. This is a band from Washington D.C. and they play a really good style of rock, mixing classic, indie and southern rock. The band played at 5 in the afternoon and sadly the crowd was just a handful of people at that time. The band seemed to not really care and they put a great performance and as a first time listener , I can safely say that their music wasn’t bad at all.

Next, after an hour break, we went to check out Constellations. Constellations, along with These United States, are up and coming bands that have been touring for most of the year and will be performing in big stages later this summer such as Lollapalooza. Constellation’s music consisted in a mix of hip hop, rock and funk, not my favorite mix but the crowd seemed to dig them. Other than making me fall in love with one of the band’s background singers, the band offered nothing new and their set was a little monotonous.

When the constellation’s were done with their set a bigger crowd gathered in the Tire Kingdom stage (the other one was the Bank of America stage. so much for indie music festivals huh?) to wait for the great We Are Scientist. The band from California took the stage the crowd finally seemed like a music festival crowd. The band started at eight on the dot and went into a high energy, punkish guitars and full sound that are characteristic of We are Scientists. After the fist couple of songs the audience was red hot and the band got more comfortable on stage with their comedic antics. They even poked fun at the Sunfest by saying that every time they banter between songs they were required by the festival to plug a different product. They played for an hour and a half, but sadly a big chunk of the crowd left because they were scheduled to play until 9: 30 and Weezer started to play at 9 on the other stage…bad timming.
At 9 P.M. Weezer took the stage, after the worst introduction by two very annoying local DJs, they launched into Hash Pipe and followed with Troublemaker and Surf Wax America to kick off their set. Not too shabby. Weezer played hit after hit and some people were really into it. Rivers Cuomo did his best to be a lead singer by putting aside his functions as a guitar player and he actually did pretty good. They did get in the set a couple of their new song from the not-so-great Ratitude, but mostly their set consisted in an abundance of songs from the blue album, Maladroit, and well known singles such as Beverly Hills and Island in the Sun in which Cuomo played all the instruments by looping them and making the crowd sing the very famous “Hip Hip”. One of the most memorable and eclectic moments of the night came when after the first encore break Weezer covered MGMT’s Kids with an insert of Lady Gaga’s Pocker face in the middle of the song, with Cuomo sporting a blond long hair wig. The band Sign off with Buddy Holly sending all concert goers home happy.